⭐️2/5 stars
🎧 Duration: 11 Hours
📱 Format: Audiobook (BorrowBox)
⏳ Time taken to finish: 4 days
Synopsis
‘So to mortal men, we are monsters. Because of our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters’
Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt.
When Poseidon commits an unforgivable act against Medusa in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can: on his victim. Medusa is changed forever – writhing snakes for hair and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. She can look at nothing without destroying it.
Desperate to protect her beloved sisters, Medusa condemns herself to a life of shadows. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .
What I thought
A feminist Medusa retelling should be an automatic win for me. This is my catnip. This is my Mount Olympus. This is the hill I will die on.
And yet, here we are, with a two-star rating and a deep sense of personal betrayal.
I listened to the audiobook through BorrowBox over four days, and from the start I just couldn’t get on with the narration. I know author-narrated audiobooks are meant to feel authentic and intimate, but this one never let me forget I was listening to someone reading words off a page. It didn’t pull me into the story; it sat me down and told me about it. By day two it had become background noise while I worked, which is not exactly the immersive, emotionally devastating experience I had signed up for. Medusa deserved better than me answering emails while she was being mythologically traumatised.
The main issue, and it is a big, snake-haired one, is that this is supposed to be Medusa’s story. That’s what it claims on the front cover. Except Medusa appears with the frequency of a guest character who couldn’t make the full filming schedule. She gets a handful of chapters (and even has to share one), while Athene sweeps in with the narrative equivalent of a Marvel contract and Andromeda gets more page time than the woman whose face is literally on the cover.
I can’t stress this enough: the most famous Gorgon in Greek mythology is a supporting character in her own retelling. And that is infuriating.
Every time I started to get invested in her perspective, we were whisked away to another god, another nymph, another mythological walk-on role. I understand the intention; the chorus of voices, the wider tapestry, the interconnectedness of the myth — but in practice it felt like being stuck in a group chat where the only person you actually want to hear from keeps getting drowned out by everyone else.
And the tone. Oh, the tone.
This book is trying very hard to be clever, and knowing, and sharply funny. I am absolutely the target audience for that sort of thing, but for me the humour landed somewhere between smug and weirdly aggressive. I still can’t decide whether that’s the writing itself or the audiobook narration. Whether I’d have read those same lines on the page and taken them as dry and witty instead of feeling like I was being lightly told off.
What makes this more frustrating is that the raw material is so powerful. Medusa’s story is about punishment, blame, transformation, and the way women are turned into symbols rather than people. It should be devastating. It should be incandescent with anger.
I should have come out of this ready to fight a god.
Instead I came out of it thinking, “Well… that passed the time.”
And I hate that. I hate being indifferent to a story that should have been thought provoking.
The “breathtaking Sunday Times bestseller” which sucked me in, almost became the final joke.
Overall
I came for the snakes, the rage, the monstrous feminine energy and the reclamation of a voice that has been silenced for centuries.
What I got was Greek Mythology: The Extended Universe, where Medusa occasionally pops in to remind you whose book this was meant to be.
Would I have enjoyed it more in physical format? Possibly. Would it have fixed the structural decision to sideline the actual main character? No. The problem isn’t the medium, it’s that the most compelling figure in the myth keeps being nudged offstage so someone else can deliver a monologue.
Interested in picking this up? I’d highly recommend avoiding the audiobook.
On Amazon – here
Bookshop.Org – here
Until next time… 🖤
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